wowwikifandomcom-20200223-history
AddOn Studio 2015 for World of Warcraft
AddOn Studio 2015 for World of Warcraft is a fully featured development environment for creating and developing World of Warcraft AddOns. AddOn Studio features a professional Lua editor with full code-completion and other modern facilities, integrated with a visual WoW UI designer, SVN repository support, project based AddOn file management and deployment, and much more. To get started follow the steps below, and feel free to visit the following pages for more information and help. Support: Issue Tracker and Forums Twitter: @AddonStudio2010. Documentation: Getting Started. History: Release History. WoW API: UI Customization. Donations: PayPal AddOn Studio 2015 for WoW What you need: Optional: Older: Getting Started Installation: * Download and install the Visual Studio Shell * Download AddOn Studio 2015 for World of Warcraft * Copy the folder 'aswow2015' in the zip file to any location you like, such as 'c:\Program Files' or 'd:\apps' * Run the WowAddonStudio.exe, or create a short-cut and run that instead. Basic usage: * Create a new Project * Add existing files or create new ones * Deploy to WoW by clicking build * Run WoW to use your AddOn... Support: * Issue Tracker and Forums and Release History * Getting Started Documentation * If you are having trouble, try running the reset.cmd in the install folder. Updating: * Rename or delete the installed 'aswow2015' folder. * Follow the Installation steps above, skipping the Visual Studio Shell portion. Product History AddOn Studio 2015 for World of Warcraft is an update of the previous AddOn Studio 2010 for World of Warcraft brought up-to-date using Visual Studio 2015, and a further continuation of the AddOn Studio for World of Warcraft line. The older AddOn Studio 2010 for World of Warcraft version will be updated in parallel, and both this version and the 2015 will be supported together to give users a choice of which IDE's style and functionality they are more comfortable with. See also AddOn Studio for World of Warcraft for a list of versions and the AddOn Studio for Wow Release History. Today's Reality Concepts of game and AddOn development, especially for WoW, are far more understood and by a much larger audience now, and the original promotional ideas for this tool no longer hold. Some concepts like pure drag-and-drop development for the masses historically have never really useful in practice. What this product really was, and is, is a general IDE for WoW AddOn development using a free Visual Studio back-end (much like the free Express versions of Visual Studio C# and Web), with additional support for graphical frame development via a fairly extensive set of modules in the IDE. There are quite a few bells and whistles too, including attempts at supporting nearly every VS integration feature there was (which would be rare for a game production tool of any kind), all of which together threatened to make WoW Add-On development tools a real first class citizen in a world where that almost never happens. What's Changed - Support for the installer was dropped. Installers, especially for a VS shell product are non-trivial and in this case probably required more traditional packaging and release QA than they had purview for. This was one of the biggest headaches faced with 1.0 and 2.0 versions, which was a huge time sink and has a history of leaving most first time users stranded at some point. Instead a great deal of work, in this version, was put into making this a portable install style product, where you just drop the files and run it. For anyone who knows about products involving COM and Windows applications, this is non-trivial as well, but is done at start up time with more intimate knowledge of what's actually missing. And because this is based on the ISO shell there's far less to do and a much greater chance for a successful experience. - Web Project - Support was added in this rendition of AddOn Studio for basic Web Project support for existing web sites. This translates to allowing a multi-project environment where you can potentially edit your AddOn website or satellite sites relating to your development or support in the same IDE that you are editing your AddOns, which for some should enhance productivity greatly. This includes support for the automatic Web Project mini-webhost, so you can run the changes locally before deploying. You wont be allowed to "create new sites" via the templates because the retail templates are for C# and VB projects which aren't supported, obviously. But this is really a non-issue since you can use any arbitrary existing folder, ftp, http address as an existing site. This feature also allows folders, like from the WoW ToolKits, to be added as a project on demand, and browsed inside the project explorer. And starting with AoS WoW 2010, allows both modern Lua editing and viewing as well as FrameXML .xml files to be viewed arbitrarily in a designer window letting you see what they look like right there. What Works This is a short list that expressly or implicitly covers major historic issues that, starting with AddOn Studio 2010, have been handled with better support, direct fixes, and/or new and updated infrastructure. Updated Support: *Cataclysm and Mists of Pandaria - Allows everything from 50400 version support, to playing well with WoW Mists and Cataclysm and earlier game content files, and Blizzard interface 'toolkits'. This cross support should help some who are still migrating using old data sets or localization toolkit files. Fixes include allowing the proper handling of file lock contention and coherency between WoW itself and AddOn Studio, and allowing both to now harmlessly and peacefully run side-by-side no matter which you start first. Also works with incomplete data sets, via the new WoW patch and content update processes. *SCC Integration for SVN - the new product includes an optional, integrated, and functional version of AnkhSVN, with full support for all context menus. There is guaranteed support for sites like the Curse sponsored WowAce and Curse Forge. Plays nicely with TortoiseSVN where you can use both of these at the same time and at will. If there is interest in using TFS or others like VisualSVN, GIT, Mecurial, etc... please let me know. *Windows Vista, Windows 7, and Windows 8 - using newer set of tools and compilers, support was updated for a much smoother experience on those OSes, and for both the 64-bit and 32-bit versions, and should still be backward compatible as far back as Visual Studio 2010 support goes. I believe this is the way back to Windows XP sp3 and above, but not of course back as far as Windows 2000, NT 4.0, or Windows 95. Windows Vista requires Vista SP1. *In-AddOn Web Editors - Full support is now included for enhanced editing of web type files in your AddOn directly, allowing the full VS functionality to exist in the AddOn projects. This includes the modern style Design/Code HTML editor, which is similar to Dream Weaver design/code style editing. This makes XML, CSS, and HTML files "first class citizens" in Visual Studio world for your AddOn. Contact celess22@gmail.com See also * AddOn Studio for World of Warcraft Documentation - getting started, more details for installation and setup * AddOn Studio for World of Warcraft History - effectively release history with changes and notes * AddOn Studio 2015 Demo * AddOn Studio for World of Warcraft - AddOn Studio 'line' of tools, major version release history * WoWBench - WoWBench WoW Lua run-time simulation, including events, frames * Viewing Blizzard's interface code External links ;Product ;Support ;News